This is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license The history of Charismatic Christianity in the Nordic countries reaches as far back as Pentecostalism itself. The bounds of these categories remain a topic of discussion, but Nordic countries have played a vital role in developing this rapidly spreading form of world-wide Christianity. Until now, research on global Charismatic Christianity has largely overlooked the region. This book addresses and analyzes its historical and contemporary trajectories in Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Through a selection of cases written by Nordic scholars from various disciplines, it demonstrates historical and contemporary diversity as well as interconnections between local, national, and global currents. Highlighting change and continuity, the anthology reveals new aspects of Charismatic Christianity.

The history of Charismatic Christianity in the Nordic countries reaches as far back as Pentecostalism itself. The bounds of these categories remain a topic of discussion, but Nordic countries have played a vital role for developing this rapidly spreading form of world-wide Christianity. Until now, research on global Charismatic Christianity has largely overlooked the region. This book addresses and analyzes its historical and contemporary trajectories in Finland, Norway and Sweden. Through a selection of cases written by Nordic scholars from various disciplines, it demonstrates historical and contemporary diversity as well as interconnections between local, national, and global currents. Highlighting change and continuity, the anthology reveals new aspects of Charismatic Christianity. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

What is the essence of charismatic Christianity, a renewal movement that stresses the Holy Spirit's work, the church's use of spiritual gifts, and the significance of the supernatural? Helen Collins gives a novel summary explanation drawn from the spiritual gifts. Through Scripture and doctrinal reflection, she shows that charismatic spirituality is a coherent, reasonable, and rich tradition with much to offer. Collins demonstrates how practicing spiritual gifts embodies a distinctive theology, making these practices carriers of doctrine. Using the Acts 2 narrative, she summarizes seven key emphases and associated practices: expectancy (prophecy), enchantment (miracles), encounter (healing), expression (testimony), equality (tongues), empowerment (evangelism), and enjoyment (worship). The result is a fresh introduction that is biblical, theologically robust, and practical, helping charismatic students to learn more about themselves and others to understand the movement and what it has to contribute to global theological discussions.

The Pentecostal movement has turned the world of religion upside down in the last century but had only sporadic impact on Europe, the traditional centre of Christendom. This book uses Denmark as its case study to work out why.

This book tells the story of the children and youth of the charismatic new religious commune Knutby Filadelfia in Sweden. It recounts the history of the congregation, which started out as a part of the Swedish Pentecostalmovement in 1921. In the 1990s, it developed into a new religion, when the congregation’s female pastor embraced the role of the Bride of Christ. The congregation became widely known in 2004 when one of its members was murdered by another member, the latter claiming to have been acting on orders from God. In 2018, the congregation dissolved after a few years of internal crisis. Sanja Nilsson provides rich empirical analysis of archival material and interviews with the congregation’s children and youth. The young informants’ personal perspectives on their own childhoods encompass narratives from their time inside the congregation, when they identified as members of a stigmatizedminority religion, as well as from the time after the dissolution of the group, when they identified asdefectors from what they came to view as a sectarian milieu. This work offers a comprehensive insight into the Knutby Filadelfia congregation, a group, that although notoriously charted by the media, has been hitherto unexplored by academics. It adds to the growing field of studies concerned with childhoods within new religions and expounds the dynamics of the defection process from the rarely applied perspective of children and youth themselves.

This volume addresses three things many people do not discuss candidly with strangers or mere acquaintances: God, sex, and politics. These can easily become topics of fierce debate, particularly when taken together, as has been the case with same-sex marriage legislation, the Vatican’s criticism of “gender ideology,” or the repeatedly asserted claim that Islam, homosexuality, and gender equality are essentially incompatible. This volume investigates what is at stake in these constructions of religion and homosexuality in public discourses. Starting with the Netherlands as a special case study, it proceeds with contributions on other predominantly postsecular countries in central, northern, and southern Europe as well as several postcommunist and postcolonial countries “beyond Europe.” Combining contemporary and historical perspectives and approaches from both the humanities and the social sciences, the contributors explore how national and European identities are constructed and contested in debates on religion and homosexuality. Chapter 2 and Chapter 8 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

How does one make disciples and plant the church in a secular environment? Does it take technical production? Is a great venue or "mother" church necessary? Does it take a well-networked team? Tangible factors such as these are easily remedied by consulting seasoned, church planting experts. Yet, what if some obstacles to plant the church aren't tangible at all? The Spirit and the Secular examines the ways that Spirit-led Christians trust the Holy Spirit while church planting amidst a secular cultural backdrop. A review of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles traces a Spirit-led Christ and Spirit-led church as they make disciples. To better discern the challenge of what it means to be a contemporary church planter in Sweden, a historical review of Swedish culture reveals the rise of secularism alongside of the flourish of the Pentecostal church of the 1900s. What follows is a groundbreaking fieldwork study using a current, investigative interview method, Q-Methodology, measuring the perceptions of thirty church planters in Sweden who reveal their collective ideal and differing practices. The study wraps with a comprehensive analysis grounding the research in a theory of Spirit-led church planting.